Productivity apps promise to make us more efficient, better focused, and of course, highly organized. But how do they do it? Do they work, and if so, how? How do productivity apps influence us so that we accomplish the things we really want to accomplish?

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist—emphasis on "behavioral"—who's interested in how technology can affect our actions. Much of his research looks at why people so often fail to act in their own best interest.

More formally speaking, he is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and a founding member of the delightfully, yet appropriately named Center for Advanced Hindsight. His first two popular books, The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational, explore many of his experiments and findings about irrational behavior, including rewards-based motivation.

I spoke with Ariely recently about how technology, and smartphone apps in particular, can keep us motivated and help us procrastinate less.

You can listen to a short clip of the interview in the video, or read the extended text version that follows.

Jill Duffy: You've written a lot about motivation. Are there any differences between how people motivate themselves in the real world versus how they do it with apps and technology, or in the online world?

Dan Ariely: In general, what we do in the app world is very much similar to what we do in the real world, with a few big changes that actually make it much more effective.

First of all, the phone is always with us. Because the phone is always with us, it's easier to create something that we will have a harder time forgetting. If you think about changing something in the environment in your house [to influence your behavior], it will only be effective when you get to that place. Because the phone is with us all the time, it has much more reach into aspects of our lives.

The second thing is that all of a sudden, small rewards are possible, like a compliment or a notification.

It's also easier to do things that are in context. If you think about the broad topic of behavioral economics, it's really about the fact that the environment matters more than we think. If that's the case, that means if we control the environment, or we control some elements in the environment, we can get people to behave differently, hopefully better.

From that perspective, the phone is actually a wonderful tool.

I have a lot of hope for technology in terms of how it can improve people's lives. The reason I spend so much time here—in San Francisco; I spend about a week a month here—is exactly because of that. I spend so much time in Silicon Valley because I'm a great believer in technology as a way to modify people's behavior.

If you gave me control over your kitchen, let's say, I could rearrange your kitchen in a way that would improve it [and help you eat healthier foods]. One of the worst things about the design of a kitchen is the refrigerator drawer for fruits and vegetables. If you're like most people, you spend a lot of money on fruits and vegetables, and when you get them, they rot in that drawer in the bottom. They rot in that drawer because it's often an opaque drawer, and you forget about their existence. This is just bad design. If you gave me more control over your kitchen, I might change the plate sizes and get smaller forks. I could make all kinds of changes that could make you behave better. But this is really, really tough [to change the physical design of the space] with a lot of things.

Not with phones. Not with technology.

Technology provides this great opportunity for good behavior.

JD: I want to circle back to what you were saying about rewards. I test a lot of applications for health and fitness, and one of the things I've noticed is that push notifications are almost never motivational. They're usually reminders, and they're very utilitarian reminders. For example, an app notification might say, "Remind me if by 10 a.m. I have not recorded the calories I ate for breakfast." But what I think would be a better reward system would be something like, "Every day at 4 p.m., send me a notification that says, 'You're doing a great job!'" Do you have some ideas in mind for how you imagine rewards on mobile phones could develop and change?

DA: I think you're right. Objectively you're right, of course. Too many notifications are purely functional. I think it comes from people's lack of understanding of what are the barriers for good performance.

Often people think that the barrier is information. For example:

"Why don't people eat well?"

"It's because they don't have the right information."

Think about that big experiment that happened in New York City, where basically every fast food place had to start having calorie information on the menu. The logic was that people are over-eating. Why are people over-eating? Because there's no information about calories. We'll put the calorie information out there, and everybody would behave well.

It turns out that didn't happen.

By the way, my team and I did experiments like that as well, and just providing information is not helpful.

We have this intuition that every time people don't behave well, the barrier is lack of knowledge. This is the rational perspective. In the rational perspective, people always make the right decision, and if they don't, it's because they don't have enough information.

But of course this is wrong.

Photo by Dan Kienan

The reason people do the wrong thing is often not because they don't have the right information, it's because they don't care right now.

I think what you're proposing is exactly right. We need to move away from the framework of assuming everything is an information gap, to a framework where we understand there is a motivational gap.

Now the question is, "How do we increase motivation?"

On the one hand, it's very, very, tough to think about how to create motivation. On the other hand, we do know something about it. We know, for example, that compliments really work. We know that having a goal really works. We know that knowing your distance from the goal really works. Being able to do something better than expected, or better than other people, and creating a competition really works. We also know that reputation is important.

If we switch from an information perspective to a motivational perspective, and think about all the motivations, we could do much better.

JD: One other element that I think about sometimes—and again, it comes up with a lot of health and fitness apps, but it's certainly applicable to office work and productivity apps—is accountability. Social features are often built into health and fitness apps so your friends can see whether you lost weight, or if you walked or ran as much as you said you would. That visibility creates accountability. In the productivity space, with office environments, the word "transparency" is almost a buzzword these days. There are a lot of applications that aim to let your co-workers or your significant other, or whoever, see your task list so they understand: What did you say you were going to do, and did you follow through on it? Or sometimes: Do you have too much on your plate and do you need some help? Can you talk about whether accountability actually works, or whether it works differently for different kinds of people?

DA: There are a couple of things there. First of all, we know it works, but I can't tell you how it works differently for different people.

There are two components to this. First is that [the task, objective, or goal] is more apparent to you. It's not about the fact that somebody else is going to nag you. It's about the fact that when we reflect [a goal or promise] in the outside world to some degree, we take what we call the outside perspective. The outside perspective is a really good indicator for people to behave well.

There was this beautiful study in which people in an office had an honor box to pay for tea and coffee. Sometimes there was a picture of flowers set up next to the container, and sometimes there was a picture of eyes. What happened was when the picture of eyes was left up, people left about three times more money. In other words, people were stealing from the office, but when there were eyes, they didn't.

Now it's not as if people were stupid and thought there was a security camera. But what people often do is become more aware. Eyes remind us about ourselves. They make us more aware, and, all of a sudden, we behave in a way we want to behave.

I'll give you another example. We did a study in which we asked people whether they would go for a second opinion. Both in medicine and in dentistry, it's often very important to go for a second opinion. What we found is that when people are doing it for themselves, they often don't go for a second opinion, but when they recommend it to other people, they think other people should go for a second opinion. It's basically saying, "I realize that going for a second opinion is important, but I don't feel comfortable asking my doctor for a referral for a second opinion because it might show him that I don't trust him."

The moment we think about things from an outside perspective, we think more long-term, and often, we behave better. We actually become more rational. You can think about this in all kinds of ways in your life. Every time you face a decision, you could say, "What would I advise somebody if it wasn't me?" It basically allows you to eliminate some of your own emotional reactions and so on, and think more long-term and better.

When you have social accountability, that's the first component. It's not about other people. It's about us seeing the world as if from the perspective of other people and in a more objective way.

The second component is actually other people nagging us and being responsible. That one I think has more variations across people because it depends who you pick. If I pick my sister, she might not hold me accountable. If I pick one of my colleagues, he might keep me more accountable. There are all kinds of things like that: How embarrassed you would be if you violated something [you said you would or wouldn't do]; how much you can get away with? It's an important component, but a bit trickier.

As long as you think that somebody is watching your activities from the outside, you might behave better.

DA: By the way I started exercising in the beginning of the year, and I made a contract with my cousin. We are each other's guards.

JD: How often do you check in with each other?

DA: At least once a week.

JD: Is there any money riding on it?

DA: What we did is define what exercising means. We also created a rule that we can only eat dessert on the weekends. But then we had to think about other instances, like what happens on holidays and birthdays and so on. We have an evolving set of rules. And then there are punishments if we misbehave. There's also a financial reward at the end. Well, for her financial reward is sooner but smaller, and for me it's bigger, but at the end of the year.

JD: And why did you make that difference?

DA: She wanted to go to a spa from time to time, so that was her reward—doing something luxurious. And I wanted something bigger.

JD: What's yours?

DA: If I do [exercise and don't eat dessert] for a year, I get to buy a motorcycle. I don't spend too much time planning on it, but I have an idea [of the bike I want].

JD: So you both crafted your rewards individually based on what you wanted. You didn't have an idea of what would be equal. You both chose what you wanted for yourself.

DA: Yes.

JD: I wanted to ask about procrastination next. Can you talk about why people procrastinate and what helps them stop procrastinating?

DA: There's the obvious link with procrastination and the workplace. There are things you should be doing, but you just don't feel like doing them today. But the reality is that procrastination is part of a general problem of "now versus later." "Now versus later" is one of the biggest problems for modern life. "Now versus later" is why we overeat and underspend. It's why we don't do our taxes on time. It's why we don't exercise. It's why people don't take medications on time. It's why kids don't study.

If you think about it, procrastination is really favoring what's pleasurable now over what we think we should be doing. The sad thing is we fail, and we fail continuously.

This is incredibly sad. Not only that, but we need to recognize the fact that procrastination or self-control is only becoming a harder problem.

As I said, one of the starting points for behavioral economics is that the environment matters, and if you think about it, the environment wants you to do stuff right now. When you walk down the street, every store basically wants you to go in right now and spend your time and money. Every app on your phone wants you to spend your time and money there. Everybody's vying for your time, attention, and money. We don't actually control our environments to a fine degree. Other entities control it, and because of that, they can lead us to make bad decisions. There's too much temptation.

These are the kinds of problems we have. And now let's think about the solutions.

One solution to eliminate temptation is to create a rule. Rules are relatively easy for us. If you have a rule that says, "I don't eat dessert," that's very simple because every moment you know if you're eating dessert or not. If you have a rule that says, "I'm on a diet. I'm going to eat less," what does it really mean? On a diet if you eat one forkful at a time, when have you had enough? It's unclear. So having rules actually creates a very clear delineation of what is acceptable and not, and when are we violating the rule or not. That actually helps us with self-control problems.

Having rules for behavior is good for fighting temptation. And having those rules link to somebody's "higher-order level" helps. Take recycling as an example. If you thought about should you recycle or not many times, you probably would not do it. But if you said, "This is what a good person does," then it would be linked to higher-order meaning, and you'd be more likely to do it.

A more extreme version of the same approach is to create a habit. A habit is not just a rule. It's something that you don't even question. It's something that you do automatically.

Another direction is reward-substitution. In the beginning of The Upside of Irrationality, I told a story about how I had to take interferon. [Read more about Ariely's medical story here.] It's a horrible medication to take. Every time I had to take it, I had to decide to either inject myself and have a miserable night, or not inject myself and have a good night, but if I skip these medications, I might get liver sclerosis in 30 years.

What I did for myself is I changed my environment and I made it such that every time I took the injection, I could also watch a movie, which was something I really wanted to do.

We call this reward-substitution, because it's not as if I started caring about my liver. It's not as if I understood something more about liver sclerosis. It's that I started thinking about the fact that I wanted to see a movie. Now, movies are much less important than liver sclerosis, but they were immediate and now.

DA: You can think about this as gamification in general. You could say there are a lot of things about procrastination that is really about favoring the short term over the long term. But can we do some things to make the short term more appealing?

Do we give people a sense of progress?

Think about kids learning to read and write. Learning to read and write is tough. Nobody really enjoys it. It's enjoyable after a while when you know how to do it, but the process of learning is not enjoyable. Can you make the process more enjoyable by giving kids other rewards? Can you give them a sense of accomplishment or rewards? All of those really help. You can give [physical rewards], too, like cookies, candy, or time to play Angry Birds. So there's another way to overcome self-control by saying, "Look. If I'm not going to be sufficiently motivated by the long-term rewards themselves, like living better 30 years from now, let me add something to my environment that will give me some short-term rewards. And with those short-term rewards, I will behave better, not because I am thinking about the long-term goal, but because I'm thinking about the short-term goal."

The final mechanism, which is incredibly important, is called the Ulysses contract. This idea is basically saying, "I know that my future self will be tempted, so let me do something so that my future self is not tempted."

Photo by Dan Kienan

My undergrads, during exam week, often give their Facebook accounts to one of their friends and ask them to change the password and not to tell them what it is until after exam week is over. That's a mechanism in which you basically force your future self to not be able to make stupid mistakes. Or another common mechanism that people use is to not buy junk food. You could say, "I love chocolate cake. Let me buy one, and let me eat a tiny bit every other day." But you know that that's not going to work out. So what do you do? You say, "I'm just not going to buy this stuff."

Self-control contracts are incredibly useful and important and good ways to eliminate procrastination.

The problem of procrastination, broadly defined, is incredibly central to all of our lives. Figuring out how we can overcome it is an important challenge and an important role for technology.

JD: A lot of the examples you gave about procrastination were about long-term changes or about actions that we do repeatedly. Is it different if you have just one thing that you are procrastinating?

DA: I don't think those are different. The specific thing you're procrastinating on is different, but the phenomenon is the same. It's the fact that it's something unpleasant, and you don't want to start it, but in the process of not starting it, you're going to pay a higher price.

By the way, here is what often happens in the workplace: You have a task to do. Let's say this task will take 15 hours. If you do it an hour and a half a day, it will take you ten days. But if you wait and you don't start it now, but instead you start it five days in advance, you can't focus for three hours a day! If you had started ten days in advance, you would have needed an hour and a half a day. If you start five days in advance, you might actually need four hours for the activity, or maybe five hours. And the last day, you have so much work to do because you've been procrastinating, that you need to work the whole day and the whole night, and per hour, you're just not getting that much done, because we have a limited amount of good hours in the day.

So at the end of the day, you procrastinate, you get into extra stress, and you waste a lot of time in the process. And somehow, what is so curious, is that we don't learn. We just do it to ourselves over and over and over.

There's one more thing: Do you know the term "structured procrastination?"

JD: No.

DA: It's a very nice term. Sometimes what we do is we want to feel productive. We do things that make us feel as if we are accomplishing things. We try to zero our email inbox. We write to-do lists, and we erase things off. We do busy work that makes us believe we are actually making progress, but in fact we're mostly just creating the appearance of progress without real progress.

The phone as a digital part of our lives has the capacity to make us unproductive, or make it easier for us to overcome a lot of barriers. And it's really a question of how we design the phone and how we design the apps.

JD: Dan, I really appreciate your time today, and I look forward to hearing about what else you have up your sleeve coming from you and your partners.

About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

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